Digital Signage: Templates

The Graduate Center's digital signage system is designed to highlight daily events as well as provide an internal communication platform to promote GC events and announcements central to our institutional purpose.

The content displayed on the screens is drawn from two sources:

The GC website Calendar which automatically feeds the events listing; and

"Flyers" created from PowerPoint slides, using the GC flyer templates at right. Developed by GC constituencies, the flyers are submitted to various content managers for placement in rotation on the digital screens.

Flyer content falls into three categories:

The flyers can be created by the GC community only, and submissions must follow branding guidelines for the Graduate Center: The preferred nomenclature for the Graduate Center is "The Graduate Center, CUNY," but not "CUNY Graduate Center." Additional digital screen details and content owners' contact information are noted in the directory below:

Promotion of GC events held within the GC building

Academic or faculty announcements/reminders

Digital Signage Best Practices

Please bear in mind that each flyer will only be visible for a duration of roughly six seconds. Therefore, we urge users to strive for clarity, brevity, and readability, in order to maximize the impact of each flyer.

To that end, all else being equal, one might want to avoid things like the following: (a) An announcement for a lecture with a three-paragraph abstract included on the flyer; (b) A flyer for a semester-long speaker series with title and description for every event in the series.

Do not attempt to alter the Powerpoint background property of the slide. If you wish your slide to have a non-white background, you must include the background as an image on the slide. Any custom formatting applied to the Powerpoint background property itself (under the “Design” tab) will most likely be lost.

Excluding possibly inessential information (e.g. GC address, institutional sponsorship, etc.), do not use font sizes smaller than ~28pt. for the body of the flyer.

Try to avoid leaving large amounts of whitespace/wasted space on the flyer. If your flyer is a brief announcement, then let the text fill the space.

Do not use exotic fonts. The digital displays do not recognize all varieties of font. Please note that fonts must be ADA compliant: use Sans Serif font only (Ariel, Geneva, Tahoma, Vedana, etc.) not Serif (Times New Roman, Cambria, Garamond, etc.). For more information about ensuring digital material is ADA compliant, please see visit CUNY's webpage on accessibility best practices.